20% lower risk of cardiovascular death when a parent lived to 80

Action Points

Individuals' risks of death from heart disease and all-cause mortality, adjusted for many confounders, were significantly lower for each decade that at least one parent lived beyond the age of 70, according to data from the U.K.

Analysis of health records during an 8-year follow-up of 186,000 middle-aged offspring from the U.K. Biobank showed that an individual's risk of death from heart disease was 20% lower for each decade that at least one parent lived beyond the age of 70.

These associations reflected adjustment for smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, ethnicity, education, and obesity in the offspring, the researchers said. Parental longevity was associated with all of these factors.

"To our knowledge, this is the largest study to show that the longer your parents live, the more likely you are to remain healthy in your sixties and seventies," Atkins said in a statement. "Asking about parents' longevity could help us predict our likelihood of aging well and developing conditions such as heart disease, in order to identify patients at higher or lower risk in time to treat them appropriately."

The study, which looked at individuals with deceased parents, recruited from 2006 to 2010 from England, Wales, and Scotland. It found that those with longer-lived parents had significantly lower incidences of peripheral vascular disease, coronary heart disease (CHD), heart failure, stroke, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and atrial fibrillation.

These results are not only positive for patients with longer-lived parents, they're good news even for those with shorter-lived parents, co-author Luke C. Pilling, PhD, also at the University of Exeter, said in an interview.

"We are keen to show that these results have a positive health message," he told MedPage Today. "Although people with longer-lived parents are more likely to live longer themselves, there are lots of ways for those with shorter-lived parents to improve their health by following current public health advice about being physically active such as going for regular walks, eating well, and not smoking."

Pilling said the researchers were pleased to find that parents' good health was transferable to offspring "via modifiable pathways that clinicians are already targeting" such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, body mass index, and the likelihood of addiction to tobacco.

The study built on previous findings from another study, also out of the University of Exeter, which looked at 75,000 U.K. Biobank participants. That study showed that individuals with longer-lived parents were more likely to have protective variants of genes linked to coronary artery disease, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and Alzheimer's disease.

The study also provided some clues about possible novel pathways to longer life, such as better DNA damage repair, said Pilling, who was the lead author of the earlier study. He added that, "Much more work is needed on these."

The analysis showed that increasing parental longevity was associated with more participant education, higher income, more physical activity, and a lower prevalence of smoking and obesity.

Age of mother's death and father's death showed inverse relationships with unadjusted mortality rate in 4,705 offspring deaths. These associations remained after adjustment for age, sex, ethnicity, education, income, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, and body mass index, and was less strong with cancer mortality (HR: 0.92; 95% CI 0.90 to 0.95), with the exception of lung cancer.

It remains to be determined whether asking about the age of a patient's parents can add predictive value to cardiovascular risk assessments, such as the QRISK score, Pilling said.

Similarly, it's unclear whether genetic information on predisposition to high blood pressure or cholesterol would improve morbidity and mortality prediction and patient outcomes. "We hope to follow this as the U.K. Biobank data has increased follow-up over the years, combined with other data sources," he said.

This work was supported by UK Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research School for Public Health Research Ageing Well (partnership) program, and the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging, U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Atkins and Pilling reported no disclosures. Alessandro Ble, MD, is a former employee of Pfizer. No other disclosures were reported.

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